Resurrection Row by Anne Perry

The Book

    This is book 4 of the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels. In it we find Pitt, after scrimping and saving out on a date night at the opera with Charlotte when he is pressed into duty because a handsom cab was stolen, and someone left a dead body to be found in it. 

He expects the case to be wrapped up quickly as there was a grave that has been opened. And so they bury the man, one of Great-aunt Vespasia's new neighbors, again. No sooner does Pitt start investigating, sure it's just the work of sick vandals, than the dead man shows up again in his church pew. 

With the same corpse having been dug up twice, Pitt must consider where the man, Lord Augustus Brumley, might have been murdered. Possibly by Lord Brumley's wife, or her admirer Mr. Dominic Corde, whom Charlotte spent years pining after. 

When the autopsy is inconclusive, and yet more dead bodies, four in all, keep turning up, Pitt chases a fiendish murder left, right and left again, until finally, he has a corpse who was definitely murdered and a man who must be guilty the murder, but cannot be the grave desecrator. Pitt has to be very clever to nab a murderer. 

But will it be enough to satisfy Charlotte, or will the morally lax Dominic intrude into his marriage? Pitt can only be the man he is. 

My Thoughts

Charlotte, although she mixes into the crowd as much as ever in this books, takes more of a backseat to Pitt, as he really begins, as a character, to come into his own. Emily is absent, and the book is the better for it. Not because I don't adore Emily, I do. But because I like the expansion of this universe. Pitt's job, his bosses, none of those are clear yet, but we begin to see him come a long way. 

I felt the insertion of Dominic Corde to be a little off putting, in a way that I don't remember feeling when I was a teenager. And I found the lack of memories of Sarah more than a little strange. This book is short, 216 pages, in fact. And was a fairly quick read, I did it in a little under 3 hours, so there was space to put her in.  

This book is not a puzzle mystery, we do not have a whole lot of clues to follow, but it more closely hews to a thriller than a traditional puzzle mystery, the type Perry had been writing to date. 

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

This book is yet another in the Ballentine Books Trade Paperback series release in the late 2010s. This book was entered into my local library on April 6, 2018. And like all of the others in particular series, they were initially stamped with the wrong date and the corrected date was added later. Like all paperbacks, to make the book last longer, it was processed by what we call technical services where the sides and outside edges of the book have been covered with heavy, clear tape to prevent wear and tear. This book looks like it has not been frequently read, but it doesn't have either the crisp book feel, or the crackle of a brand new book being opened. Somebody, or more than one somebody in my local community, both loves mysteries and is a gentle reader. The markings on the back of this book say it costs $17.00. As an aside, I find it interesting, that after all of these years marking things a xx.99, in this book Ballantine changed to a straight $17.00. While I was in business school, one of the lectures centered on the psychology of pricing. The reason why so many things are priced at $xx.99 is because the brain reads it as dollar lower than the price actually is, and takes it a hot minute to catch up to budget correctly. It was a trick deployed to get that extra dollar out of all of us. Going back to straight dollar pricing tells me that at least this publishing imprint decided that theory was no longer valid. So, perhaps, if I become an indie author, I will keep this in mind. 

This Book                       $17.00

This Summer                $133.99